An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet)

by Daniel Abraham

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. His voice echoed against the stone walls, sounding hollow. He turned to meet Cehmai’s gaze. “I don’t know if I can go through with this, Cehmai-kya.”

  “I know,” the other poet said, but did not pause in his work of chalking symbols into the spare walls. “I felt the same before I took Stone-Made-Soft from my master. I don’t think any poet has ever gone to the binding without some sense he was jumping out of a tower in hopes of learning to fly on the way down.”

  “But the binding,” Maati said. “We haven’t had time.”

  “I don’t know,” Cehmai said, turning to look at Maati. “I’ve been thinking about it. The draft you made. It’s as complex as some bindings I saw when I was training. The nuances support each other. The symbols seem to hang together. And the structure that deflects the price fits it. I think you’ve been working on this for longer than you think. Maybe since Saraykeht fell.”

  Maati looked out the snow door at their bright square of sky. His chest felt tight. He thought for a moment how sad it would be to have come this far and collapse now from a bad heart.

  “I remember when I was at the village the second time,” Maati said. “After Saraykeht. After Liat left me. There was a teahouse at the edge of the village. Tanam Choyan’s place.”

  “High walls,” Cehmai said. “And a red lacquer door to the back room. I remember the place. They always undercooked the rice.”

  “He did,” Maati said. “I’d forgotten that. There was a standing game of tiles there. I remember once a boy came to play and didn’t know any of the rules. Not even what season led, or when two winds made a trump. He bet everything he had at the first tile. He knew he was in over his head, so he risked it all at once. He thought if he kept playing, then the men at the table who knew better than he did would strip him of every length of copper he had. If he put everything on one hand—well, someone had to win, and it might be him as well as anyone else. I understand now how he felt.”

  “Did he win?”

  “No,” Maati said. “But I respected the strategy.”

  A trumpet blared out above them—Otah sending some signal among his men. Answering horns came from around the city. Maati could no more tell where they originated than guess how many snowflakes were in the wide air. Cehmai’s surprised breath caught his attention like a hook pulling at a fish. He turned to the man, and then followed his gaze to the stairway leading down to the tunnels. Eiah stood there, her ribs pumping hard, as if she’d run to reach them. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot at the back. Her robes were bright green shot with gold.

  “Eiah-cha,” Cehmai said, stepping toward her. “What are you doing here?”

  The girl looked up at Cehmai, stepping away from him as if she might run. Her gaze darted to Maati. He smiled and took a pose that was welcome and inquiry both. Eiah’s hands fluttered between half a dozen poses, settling on none of them.

  “They need physicians,” she said. “People are going to get hurt. I don’t want to be useless. And…and I want to be here when you stop them. I helped with the binding as much as Cehmai did.”

  That was a gross untruth, but the girl delivered it with such conviction that Maati felt himself half-believing. He smiled.

  “You were supposed to go with Nayiit-cha and your brother,” Maati said.

  Her mouth went small, her face pale.

  “I know,” she said. Maati waved her closer, and she came to him, skirting around Cehmai as if she feared he would grab her and haul her away to where she was supposed to be. Maati sat on the cold stone floor and she sat with him.

  “It isn’t safe here,” he said.

  “It’s safe enough that you can be here. And Papa-kya. And you’re the two most important men in the world.”

  “I don’t know that—”

  “He’s the Emperor. Even the Khai Cetani says so. And you’re going to kill all the Galts. There can’t be any place safer than with both of you. Besides, what if something happens and you need a physician?”

  “I’ll find one of the armsmen or a servant they can spare,” Cehmai said. “We can at least have her safely—”

  “No,” Maati said. “Let her stay. She reminds me why we’re doing this.”

  Eiah’s grin was the image of relief and joy. Of all the terrors and dangers arrayed before them, hers had been that she might be sent away. He took her hand and kissed it.

  “Go sit by the stairs,” he said. “Don’t interrupt me, and if Cehmai-cha tells you to do something, you do it. No asking why, no arguing him out of it. You understand me?”

  Eiah flung her hands into a pose of acceptance.

  “And Eiah-kya. Understand what I’m doing has risks to it. If I die here—hush, now, let me finish. If I fail the binding and my little protection doesn’t do what we think it will, I’ll pay the price. If that happens, you have to remember that I love you very deeply, and I’ve done this because it was worth the risk if it meant keeping you safe.”

  Eiah swallowed and her eyes shone with tears. Maati smiled at her, stood again, and waved her back toward the stairs. Cehmai came close, frowning.

  “I’m not sure that was a kind thing to tell her,” he said, but a sudden outburst of trumpet calls sounded before Maati could reply. Maati thought he could hear the distant tattoo of drums echoing against the city walls. He gestured to Cehmai.

  “Come on. There isn’t time. Finish drawing those, then light the candles and close that blasted door. We’ll all freeze to death before the andat can have its crack at us.”

  “Or we’ll have it all in place just in time for the Galts to take it.”

  Maati scribbled out the rest of the binding. He’d wanted time to think on each word, each phrase; if he’d had time to paint each word like the portrait of a thought, it would have been better. There wasn’t time. He finished just as Cehmai lit the final lantern and walked up the stone steps to the snow door. Before he closed it, the younger poet looked out, peering into the city.

  “What do you see?”

  “Smoke,” Cehmai said. Then, “Nothing.”

  “Come back down,” Maati said. “Where are the robes for it?”

  “In the back corner,” Cehmai said, pulling the wide wooden doors shut. “I’ll get them.”

  Maati went to the cushion in the middle of the room, lowered himself with a grunt, and considered. The wall before him looked more like the scribblings of low-town vandals than a poet’s lifework. But the words and phrases, the images and metaphors all shone brighter in his mind than the lanterns could account for. Cehmai passed before him briefly, laying robes of blue shot with black on the floor where, with luck, the next hands to hold them wouldn’t be human.

  Maati glanced over his shoulder. Eiah was sitting against the back wall, her hands held in fists even with her heart. He smiled at her. Reassuringly, he hoped. And then he turned to the words he had written, took five deep breaths to clear his mind, and began to chant.

  OTAH STOOD on the lip of the roof and looked down at Machi as if it were a map. The great streets were marked by the lines of rooftops. Only those streets that led directly to House Siyanti’s warehouses were at an angle that permitted him to see the black cobbles turning white beneath the snow. To the south, the army of the Galts was marching forward. The trumpet calls from the high towers told him that much. They had worked out short signals for some eventualities—short melodies that signaled some part of the plans he had worked with Sinja and Ashua Radaani and the others. But in addition there was a code that let him phrase questions as if they were spoken words, and hear answers in the replies from the towers far above.

  The trumpeter was a young man with a vast barrel chest and lips blue with cold. Whenever Otah had the man blow, the wide brass bell of the trumpet seemed as if it would deafen them all. And yet the responses were sometimes nearly too faint to hear. Times like now.

  “What’s he saying?” the Khai Cetani asked, and Otah held up a hand to stop him, straining to
hear the last trailing notes.

  “The Galts are taking the bridge,” Otah said. “I don’t think they trust the ice.”

  “That’ll mean they’re longer reaching us,” the Khai Cetani said. “That’s good. If we can keep them out of the warmth until sundown …”

  Otah took a pose of agreement, but didn’t truly believe it. If they were able to trap the Galts above ground when night came, the invaders would take over the houses and burn whatever they could break small enough to fit in the fire grates. If the cold air moved in—a storm or the frigid winds that ended the gentle snows of autumn—then the Galts would be in trouble, but the snow graying the distance now wasn’t prelude to a storm. Otah didn’t say it, but he couldn’t imagine keeping an army so close and still at bay long enough for the weather to change. The Galts would be defeated here in the streets, or they wouldn’t be defeated.

  He paced the length of the rooftop, his eyes tracing the routes that he had hoped to guide them toward—the palaces and the forges. Behind him, his servants shivered from the cold and the need to remain respectfully still. The great iron fire grate that they’d hauled up and loaded with logs was burning merrily, but somehow the heat from it seemed to go out no more than a foot or two from the flames. The Khai Cetani stood near it, and the trumpeter. Otah couldn’t imagine standing still. Not now.

  The southern reaches of the city were essentially Galtic already; there was no way to make them safe against the coming army. The battle would be nearer the center, in the shadows of the towers, in the narrower ways where Otah’s men could appear all along the Galtic line at once as they had in the forest. Another trumpet call came. The Galts had finished crossing the river. The march had begun on Machi itself.

  I should be down there, Otah thought. I should get a sword or an axe and go down there.

  It was an idiotic idea, and he knew it. One more blade or bow in the streets wouldn’t matter now, and getting himself killed would achieve nothing.

  Trumpets sounded—half a dozen of them at once. And Galtic drums. Everyone sending signals, none of them listening. Otah squatted at the roof’s edge with his eyes closed, trying to make out one message from another. Frustration built in his spine and neck. Something was happening—several things, and all at the same moment, and he couldn’t hear what they were.

  “Most High!” one the servants called. “There!”

  Otah and the Khai Cetani both looked to where the servant boy was pointing. A runner dashed along a roofline, down near the great, wide streets that led toward the forges. A great pillar of smoke was rising from the south. Something there, then. Otah felt the first small surge of hope; it was near where he had hoped the Galts would go. The trumpets were calling again, fewer of them. Otah found himself better able to make sense of them. The Galts seemed to be moving in three directions at once—sweeping and holding the southern buildings, and then two large forces moving as Otah had hoped they would.

  “Call to the towers,” Otah said. “Tell them to begin.”

  The trumpeter took a great breath and blared out the melody they had set for the towers, and then the rising trill that was their signal to begin raining stones and arrows into the streets. It was less than a breath before Otah thought he saw something fly from the open sky doors far above them, plummeting toward the ground. The snow was tricky, though. It might only have been his imagination.

  Otah felt himself trying to stretch out his will across the city, to inhabit it like a ghost, to become it. Time slowed to a terrible crawl—years seeming to pass between the short announcing blasts of the trumpets as they reported the Galts’ progress. Muffled by the snow, there also came the sound of distant voices raised in anger. Otah’s belly knotted. That wasn’t right. There shouldn’t be any fighting yet. Unless the Galts had found his men while they were still in hiding. He almost signaled his trumpeter to sound the order to report, but the more the signals were used, the better the Galts would be able to find the trumpeters.

  “You,” Otah said, pointing at one of the half-frozen servants. “Send a runner to the east. I need to know what’s happening there.”

  The man took a pose of acknowledgment and walked quickly and awkwardly back toward the stairs. Otah tapped his hand against the stone lip of the roof, already impatient for the word to come back to him. His feet and face were numb. The snowfall seemed to be thickening, the world a darker gray though the unseen sun was still likely six or seven hands above the southern horizon.

  From the west, the drums of Galt thundered, then were silent. Then thundered again. Otah heard the sudden sharp call—thousands of voices at once in a wild call that ended sharply. A boast. We are vast as the ocean and disciplined. We are soldiers. We have come to kill you. Fear us.

  And he did.

  “Signal the palace forces to take their places,” Otah said.

  The trumpeter sang out the call, the wide bell of the trumpet playing over the western rooftops like a priest offering blessing to a crowd. The man was weeping, Otah saw. Tears streaking down his cheeks and into his beard. A terrible, rending crash came from the forges. Otah turned to peer through the rising smoke and the falling snow. He expected to see one of the great copper roofs sitting at an angle, but nothing seemed to have changed. The sound was a mystery.

  “I can’t stand this,” Otah said, stalking back to the Khai Cetani and the servants. There was snow gathering on the servants’ shoulders. “I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t command a battle blind and guessing. Where are the runners?”

  The eldest of the servants took a pose of apology.

  “Then go find out,” Otah said.

  But Otah felt in his bones what the runners would tell him. Before the signals came—trumpets struggling through the muffling snow. Before the Galtic drums broke out in their manic pounding. Nine thousand veterans led by the greatest general in Galt were pouring into his city and facing blacksmiths and vegetable carters, laborers and warehouse guards.

  He was losing.

  Balasar trotted through the streets, his shield held above his head. Despite what Sinja had said, the great towers of Machi commanded the streets around them fairly well. Throughout the day, stones and bricks peppered his men, sailing down from the sky with the force of boulders hurled by siege engines. Arrows sometimes came down as well, their points shattering against the ground where they struck despite the slowly growing cushion of snow. He ducked into another doorway when he came to it. Five of his own men were waiting, and the bodies of ten or so of the enemy. It was a slow process, spreading out and then moving down not only the streets that were the fastest path to the tunnels, but also two or three to each side. The Khai Machi had learned a trick, and he’d used it against Coal. But he didn’t have a second strategy, and so Balasar knew where to find the waiting forces—just back from where they’d be seen, waiting to attack on all sides at once. Instead, Balasar was killing them by handfuls. It was a bad way to fight—bloody, slow, painful, and unnecessary.

  But it was better than losing.

  “General Gice, sir,” the captain said as all the men saluted him. Balasar raised his hand. His arm ached from holding the raised shield. “We’re making progress, sir.”

  “Good,” Balasar said. “What have we found?”

  “All the smaller passages are blocked off, sir. Collapsed or filled with rubble so deep we can’t tell how long it would take to dig them out. And they’re narrow, sir. Two men together at most.”

  “We wouldn’t want those anyway,” Balasar said. “Better we keep for the objectives. And casualties?”

  “We’re estimating five hundred of the enemy dead, sir. But that’s rough.”

  “And our men?”

  “Perhaps half that,” the captain said.

  “So many?”

  “They aren’t good fighters, sir, but they’re committed.”

  Balasar sighed, his mind shifting. If he assumed the force pushing toward the palaces was having similar luck, that meant something like fifteen h
undred dead since he’d walked into the city. More, if there was resistance in the south. This wasn’t a battle, only slow, ugly slaughter. He went to the doorway, peering out down the street. He could hear the sounds of fighting—men’s voices, the clash of metal on metal. A hundred small outbursts that became a constant roar, like raindrops falling on a pond.

  “Get the drummer,” he said. “We’ll make a push for it. Scatter the enemy, take the entrance to the tunnels and then get runners to the others.”

  “The men we’re seeing, sir. They’re able-bodied. And decent fighters, some of them.”

  “They wanted to do this on the surface,” Balasar said. “The tunnels will be their second string. It won’t be as bad once we’re in there. If they’re smart, they’ll see there’s no point going on.”

  The captain saluted without answering. Balasar was willing to take that as agreement.

  It took perhaps half a hand to gather a force of men together. Two hundred soldiers would press forward and take the forges, where Sinja had said the paths down would be open. They were only another street down. There wasn’t a line of defenders to crush, so the horsemen were less useful. They could still move fast, and men on foot who entered the streets wouldn’t be able to attack them easily. Footmen with archers interspersed between them ducking fast from doorway to doorway was the best plan.

  He explained it all to the group leaders, watching the men’s faces as he asked them to run through the rain of stones and arrows. Two hundred men to move forward, to take control of the forges and then hold the position against anything that came up out of it until the rest of their force could join them. Balasar would lead them. Not one of them hesitated or voiced objection.